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What is a Western?
A lonely smoke in the desert, the sunset over a long river, a galloping horse, a majestic cowboy, or a life-and-death showdown with guns drawn back to back?
Andre Bazin said that those are just superficial symbols of Westerns, which can neither define the genre of Westerns nor generalize the charm of Westerns, while the essence of Westerns is actually myth.
The primary purpose of mythology is to respond to a need to "shape the collective consciousness of the group." As an immigrant country, the attraction and inspiration of the United States to immigrant immigrants relies on the logically clear and enforceable "American Dream" that "ideals can be realized through personal struggle". The most influential recruitment advertisements on the Internet have been updated with branches and leaves, and countless types of layouts, color matching, and delivery channels have been changed, but the backbone slogan has remained the same.
And in that era, in the era when "America" as a collective memory first originated, the history of struggle at the individual level fits perfectly with the history of the western frontier at the national level.
Once myths were handed down orally and later published in volumes, before the proliferation of television and the Internet, film became the best medium for modern humans. In the struggle between civilization and barbarism, cowboy sheriffs fight against Indians and villains, riding horses and revolvers on their waists, and together with train tracks, they build the modern order.
In the majestic wilderness scenery and symphony, the westerns thoroughly epicize the American people's western pioneering history full of violence, blood and sin through firm optimism and simple, crude and even childish plots. Romanticized, and in this way explained the "birth of a nation".
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Western is a highly stylized type of film, so the huge differences in language, customs, and natural landscapes cannot stop the popularity of Westerns in the world, especially in Europe, especially in southern Europe. From geography to culture, the distance from the United States has become There is more room for imagination, and the European film industry is in urgent need of revival after the war. It is easy to imitate and low in cost. The western films that are popular with the people have become the preferred copycat objects of Europeans. The "Spaghetti Western," or "Macaroni Western," was born.
It is precisely because of the childishness and stylization of American westerns in the "classical period" that the macaroni westerns that entered the "period of revision" and even the "period of parody" quickly completed their rebellion against tradition. Sergio Leone is preparing on the stage of history.
Leone was born in an Italian film family. In the early years, he worked for De Sica and worked as an assistant director on the crew of "The Bicycle Stealer". As a great director in film history, he only had 7 works in his life, which is really not many. The debut feature, The Colossus of Rhode Island, was a follow-up epic following the trend of Hollywood blockbusters at the time, and Leone packed everything he learned from his assistantships on Trojan Horse and Ben-Hur. This movie, with its exquisite costumes and clumsy special effects, has received a mediocre response since then.
The rest of his life belongs to two trilogy that shines through the history of film - the "Red Dead Trilogy" consisting of "Red Dead Redemption", "Red Dead Redemption" and "Golden Red Dead Redemption", and "Once Upon a Time in the West", "Once Upon a Time" and "Once Upon a Time in America" constitute the "Once Upon a Time Trilogy", 5 westerns, 1 gangster film, all about America.
Because of "Once Upon a Time in America", I thought for a long time that Leone was supposed to be an American, but later I found out that not only was the director an authentic "foreigner", but the great movies about the West and America were all "foreign movies", and were "The Bad and the Bad", voted by Americans as the number one Western film history, is still the highest rated "foreign film" on IMDB.
The shock of the above facts is ultimately attributed to the admiration of "America" as a cultural phenomenon. To say, "Heroes in the world have entered our center." After Tang Taizong, it was the gang of Americans who said this, and they really deserved their name.
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Standing in the rubble after World War II, Europeans fantasized about America as synonymous with hope, happiness, and freedom. The United States, which the young Leone learned through news reports, novels, comics, and westerns, is an unprecedented new type of country, a religion, a melting pot, and the greatest human dream ever built by people all over the world. aggregate. There are epic heroes, there are cowboy rangers, and there are railroad tracks that travel across continents, with no beginning and no end.
"As a European, America both fascinates and surprises me. The more I like her, the more light-years away I feel. I love the dynamism of Americans, and I'm fascinated by the endless contradictions. It's this mix of vigor and contradiction that makes her so special.
America is a mix of fantasy and reality. In the United States, dreams can become reality unknowingly, and reality can suddenly become a dream unknowingly. This is what I feel most deeply about. Fantasy and reality are always at odds, only in the United States, they are so starkly opposed and unified.
America is Griffith plus Spielberg, Watergate plus Martin Luther King, Johnson plus Kennedy. Italy is just one Italy, France is just one France, and America is the whole world. America's problems are common all over the world: contradictions, fantasies, poetry. "
"Contradiction" is actually the key word for understanding Sergio Leone.
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Leone had always admired John Ford's almost naive optimism. As Irish descendants, the protagonists in John Ford's lenses always have a high moral standard that is almost religious, majestic yearning and pursuing a dreamy future.
But Leone couldn't do it. "As descendants of Rome, we always bear the scars of the fall of the empire and a strong sense of frustration. In my eyes, the western world is not only violence, but also violence."
He was undoubtedly violent.
Waking up from the glittering American dream, looking at the crisis-ridden wasteland, the Indians have gone, and now there are lone killers, bounty hunters and robbers. Wandering around whistling and riding a horse becomes a lifeless act, and the next second you will be knocked down by a cold gun outside the frame, along with the horse and the horse. The protagonist broke off the shackles of the role model of justice early, and the moral standards even deteriorated in the trilogy - the ranger who was influenced by "The Stick of Heart" in the first part was set in the second part, and he became a bounty. Hunter, to the third part, is an occasional part-time fraudster.
But he is also warm and even compassionate.
Bazin once concluded that, in order to fit in with the protagonist's character, traditional westerns clearly pursue a kind of epic from the picture structure. There are no close-ups, and almost no close-ups or mid-range busts, except to capture a heroic moment. They favor panorama and long-range shots, negate framing by panning and moving photography, try to greedily create a grander, grander sense of space through motion, place heroes and horses on the horizon, complete nature, and In a desperate struggle between man and nature.
The rebel Leone, on the other hand, not only introduced a large number of close-ups in Westerns, but also opened up these meticulous observations and gazes to everyone, heroes, villains, small people who could die at any time, and even group portraits. He has always been willing to use slow panning shots to show the onlookers, showing their irrelevant identities, emotions and circumstances, or to show them with a long stare at the southern soldiers who endured pain and humiliation in a prisoner of war camp grief and humiliation. Leone may have created a western world with too much violence, but it is also here that "life" has gained unprecedented respect.
He is so soothing and even, recklessly using a lot of adagio pans and close-ups in the film, this "dare to show" confidence occasionally challenges the patience of the audience, so that many critics criticized him at the time "Endless".
In what may well be the most famous duel in film history at the end of "The Bad and the Bad", he uses 5 minutes, 74 shots, to show a few seconds of plot. The difference between "movie time" and "story time" is bizarrely enlarged in reverse. The act of duel has acquired a solemn sense of ritual in the long event, and the audience, as the spectator of the ceremony, has to hold their breath to accelerate Heartbeat, looking forward to the moment when the suspense of life and death was revealed.
For this sense of ritual, the dueling cowboys are placed in various "circles" by the camera like gladiators placed in the Colosseum. The duel in "The Bad and the Bad" takes place in the center of the huge circular cemetery at Desolate Mountain Cemetery.
In Martin Scorsese's opinion, this is a transplant of an Italian opera aria, although Leone himself denies it.
He is soothing, but also obsessed with "fast". Although there is no evidence that Eastwood played the same role in the trilogy, this tall and handsome cowboy always amazes all four with his quick gun skills. Because of "Hays Code", American Westerns have scruples about the display of violence. They often break down the shooting scenes. In one shot, someone shoots, and in the next shot, someone falls to the ground, but Leone likes to put The actions of pulling out a gun, shooting, and falling to the ground are shown in one shot. One second, the cowboy was drinking calmly with his back to a group of enemies. The next second, he turned around and took out his gun "pia! pia! pia !", without any falsehood.
Leone's cowboys are always lazy and decadent, and occasionally think about life without business, but no matter when and where they pull their guns and kill people, they are always incredible.
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Leone's debut film received a mediocre response, and it coincided with the sluggish Italian film market. In order to make money to support his family, he had to rack his brains to find a film to shoot. At that time, the western copycat style in Italy had already begun to take shape. After watching Akira Kurosawa's "The Stick of the Heart", he unceremoniously adapted it into a western film. Because of the budget, he couldn't afford to invite Henry, who was thinking of him. Fonda hired Clint Eastwood, a fledgling man at the time, as the male lead. The original name of "Red Dead Redemption" is "Per un pugno di dollari", which translates to "To Make Some Dollars".
Akira Kurosawa praised the film, "It's well done!" and was furious, "But it's totally my movie!" So he took Leone and the production company to court and won the award. The film's distribution rights in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and 15% of the film's global box office.
The studio fell out with Leone and refused to pay him. Leone, who had no plans to continue filming westerns, rallied the original team and filmed "Best of the Twilight", the Italian name is "Per qualche dollaro in più", "to earn some more dollars".
And finally, the great Bad and Bad. At the end of the episode, the good guy takes off his overcoat, uses a cigarette to kill the dying Confederate soldier, then puts on the Mexican cape that the soldier has thrown aside and rides his horse to the little red Dead Redemption character. town. We mentioned Leone's preference for "circle" in "Sense of Ritual". In fact, the entire "Bad Man Trilogy" is connected end to end, and finally forms a circle.
In the hands of Leone, who is good at and loves flashbacks, even the vicious villains are often melancholy indulged in the past, but Eastwood always comes and goes casually, he has no name, no past, and doesn't seem to care much. In the future, he will just walk arrogantly and happily in the wilderness of his own destiny, with no beginning and no end.
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